A British tourist is to be deported from Sri Lanka, after she was arrested at Bandaranaike International Airport in the capital Colombo for having a tattoo of Buddha on her arm.

Naomi Michelle Coleman had arrived at the airport from India, and was detained when the tattoo of a Buddha seated on a lotus flower was spotted on her right arm, according to Sri Lankan police officials.

After her arrest Coleman, appeared before a magistrate who ordered her deportation, which will take place “very soon…tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” a police spokesman said.

He added that the 37-year-old was arrested for “hurting others’ religious feelings”.

At some point we’re going to have to acknowledge that scientific reductionism as we practice it is no longer an adequate means of explaining reality. In fact, it’s actually sort of becoming a threat to the entire psychic eco system. There’s nowhere to turn but in my friends, but I don’t see a whole fuck of a lot of that sentiment going mainstream anytime soon. People love to shop for useless crap, but when do we start addressing issues of quality over quantity in regards to human consciousness? Where did this expansionary agenda of rampant breeding stem from in the first place? Why exactly did we feel the need to procreate out of control so rapidly? The answer lies in materialist philosophy, quite possibly implanted into our collective brainstems from afar like a catalyst. If you only believe in outwardly repeatable phenomenon, you’re probably ignoring the vast majority of your inner life.… Read the rest

A thousand-year-old Buddhist statue taken from Tibet in 1938 by an SS team seeking the roots of Hitler’s Aryan doctrine was carved from a meteorite, scientists reported on Wednesday.

In a paper published in an academic journal, German and Austrian researchers recount an extraordinary tale where archaeology, the Third Reich and cosmic treasure are intertwined like an Indiana Jones movie.

Called the “Iron Man” because of the high content of iron in its rock, the 24-centimetre (10-inch) -high statue was brought to Germany by an expedition led by Ernst Schaefer, a zoologist and ethnologist.

Backed by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and heading a team whose members are all believed to have been SS, Schaefer roamed Tibet in 1938-9 to search for the origins of Aryanism, the notion of racial superiority that underpinned Nazism.

Weighing 10.6 kilos (23.3 pounds), the statue features the Buddhist god Vaisravana seated, with the palm of his right hand outstretched and pointing downwards.